Monday, 18 February 2008

The second edition of the Google Geek Night in February 2008 was bigger than the first one . A lot more Google staff members, more space, more food and more presentations.

The best one was probably the Google Mapplets presention. Google Mapplets are mini-applications in JavaScript that run on Google Maps. They are actual Google Gadgets that exploit Google Maps only. Using the example of the Beijing Olympic website, the Google Mapplets Developer (I forgot his name, sorry) demonstrated how you can improve the user experience without any clicks out of the page. In other words the visitors can access a large amount of information in different format (images, text and video) about all the different locations of the Beijing Olympic without even having to follow any navigation pattern. The visitor stays on the same page, but navigate within the interactive elements of the page (Mapplets/Gadgets).

These Google Gadgets/Mapplets are "websites within a website" and are highly likely to change the traditional way of thinking and designing websites. Exploiting Google Gadgets/Mapplets to a next level could remove the barriers to access information and we can even think of a website with only an handful of pages, which will each include Gadgets/Mapplets to display textual and visual information.

The Google Geek Night also included a presentation of each of the Google products that bring money to Google( Adwords, AdSense, and You Tube). However, the second edition include information on neither the Google Algorithm update nor the 'non-revenue-generating produtcs' such as Google Webmaster Tools or Blogger. It is a bit of a shame, but they have to pay for the food and drinks.